Q & A / Alain de Botton / A new direction in travel writing

Regan McMahon, Chronicle Assistant Book Editor

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, August 4, 2002

A little book about a big figure in literature put Alain de Botton on the map in 1997, when "How Proust Can Save Your Life" became an international best-seller. Readers were captivated by the young philosophy professor's quirky take on the great author, a tongue-in-cheek self-help book for intellectuals.

His next book, "Consolations of Philosophy" (2000), was well received, but his latest, "The Art of Travel" (Pantheon; 255 pages; $23), looks like another grand success. It came out in England in late May and sold 38,000 copies in its first month, amazing for a pocket-size package of provocative, scholarly musings and full-page art -- photos, paintings and even a picture of the author's bedroom -- that amplify and illustrate his points.

De Botton's dry wit and passion for ideas infuses his work and his conversation. He spoke to The Chronicle from his home in London, where he is director of the graduate philosophy program at London University. Not bad for a guy who's 32.

Q: I hear your book is already a big hit in England.

A: Yes, unexpectedly.

Q: Why do you say "unexpectedly"?

A: I don't know. I just thought it would be a small book, thinking maybe people wanted to read about Proust or philosophy but not necessarily travel. But it seems they want to read about travel even more. So I'm delighted.

Q: Were you surprised that your Proust book was such a success?

A: I was, actually. And in fact it was mostly a success in the States, and certainly contradicted all the assumptions one might have about uneducated Americans. There are lots of highly educated and thoughtful ones.

Q: How did the idea for "The Art of Travel" come about?

A: Well, really, the idea was to write about places and their effect on us, sort of the psychology of places. And it seemed to me that traveling is the time we go to places, and we do so in search of happiness, broadly speaking. So that was the starting point: to look at the pleasures that are available by moving places, and also some of the displeasure that we might run into.

Q: How much do you travel?

A: Not a huge amount. Maybe three or four times a year, and they may not be huge trips.

But I deliberately wanted to make the book a kind of anti-big-travel book. Most of the travel books you'll find in the bookstores are about heroic travels or extraordinary travels. This was deliberately a story of very ordinary travels, but trying to drive big themes through these ordinary travels.

Q: Is it true that you live in both Washington, D.C., and London?

A: My mother lives in Washington,D.C., but I live in London. I have traveled between many different cultures. I grew up in Switzerland, speaking French, and then moved to England as a boy. And even though my mother only moved to America when I was 18, having a family member living in another country gives you an added reach. I've always felt between cultures, not able to identify myself wholly and happily with just one culture.

Q: Judging by your last name, is your father French?

A: Actually, it's a Jewish Spanish name, a Sephardic name. Neither of my parents is French. My father grew up in Egypt, in Alexandria. My family and I have been wandering around for a long, long time.

Q: Your device of using a different "guide" in each chapter -- Baudelaire, Flaubert, John Ruskin, Edward Hopper, Van Gogh -- is very interesting. Were these people who had already influenced you, or did you come upon them in your research for the book?

A: Almost all of them were people I'd come across before. Very few of them are actually travelers; they're mostly doing other things -- writing books or painting pictures or being scientists -- and they happen to travel. But they're not travel writers as such. That again was deliberate. I was trying to break travel out of its mold and trying to say there are some universal themes here. And to say that one can find a whole host of countries exotic and romantic, and even sexualized. There are people who find Finland their ideal of the exotic. It doesn't have to be the Middle East and the dusky woman in the harem. It can be the muscular Nordic skier or whatever one fancies.

Q: Which areas of philosophy do you specialize in?

A: My interests are twofold. One is an area called aesthetics, which is really the philosophy of art. The other is a particular area of ethics, which is really about how should we live, and wisdom. A lot of my last book ("Consolations of Philosophy") was looking at key figures in that wisdom tradition of philosophy. I'm definitely on the how-to-live end of philosophy.

Q: Your books are like long, well-researched ruminations. Do you ruminate because you're a philosopher, or are you a philosopher because you ruminate?

A: Well, I ruminate because whenever something strikes me as either very pleasurable or very beautiful, or strikes me as very painful or difficult, my instinct is to pick up a pen and start thinking. You can almost divide mankind into what people do when they feel unhappy or very happy. Some people go jogging, others start drinking or singing or shouting or start hitting someone or whatever. Then there's another group of people one can broadly call intellectuals who just start thinking about things. That's my response. And it's out of that very personal sense that my books arise.

Even though they might seem academic, because there's research and references to other books and historical events, basically these books are incredibly autobiographical and driven by very personal needs. So it's very much my own therapy I'm doing.

Q: You describe universal experiences travelers have -- the loneliness of waiting in bus stations, looking out the airplane window and marveling at the sight of clouds. People don't talk about those in travel books, and yet that's what travelers experience.

A: That's right. What I wanted to do was purely describe feelings. And in my descriptions I was quite influenced by Proust, because what struck me when I first read Proust was that he was so unboring in his descriptions. Most descriptions of the landscape and the weather tend to be quite dull in novels. But when Proust would describe what the sky looked like or what the sea looked like, it was very interesting because he always describes it psychologically.

He doesn't just say what things look like. He tells you what he feels or what the characters feel in relation to a place. So he'll talk about the sky seeming angry, how it reflects a sad mood or echoes some of his memories.

Whatever it is, he gives us a very subjective psychological description of physical places. And that was a real inspiration for me, to not just describe how things look but to describe our feelings toward how they look.

Q: Has the book affected your attitude toward travel?

A: Well, since writing the book I'm traveling less but traveling with more pleasure. So it's done its therapy as far as I'm concerned.

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